Does One Size Fit All?

Education for the masses

We have not moved far away from rote learning in large groups.

It’s time to take a better informed look at the way we learn – a data-informed look at Precision Education…

Such precision will depend on our ability to rapidly combine the features and assets of multiple tools and assessment modalities. Just as one learning style does not fit all, we should also not expect a single educational tool or platform to do it all, either. Not too long ago, in our own institution, we were being exhorted to use our (admittedly powerful) LMS to do it all. But even with many added modules, our LMS, Desire2Learn, could not provide some of the key functions we needed.

Similarly, we could spend a lot of money trying to bend our custom-written applications to do everything – but this would not be a smart application of smart applications(!). Let’s take a look at what one of these bespoke applications can provide. OpenLabyrinth, our education research platform, has some unique features:

The above OpenLabyrinth case (embedded here in WordPress, using an H5P widget) has built-in timers. If the learner does not respond within the timeout period, they are moved on to the next page. (If you want to try out OpenLabyrinth and edited cases for yourself, use this page to request a free account.) Let’s look at some other factors…

And now to wrap up, what did we learn? (All your responses, clicks, views, rewinds and pauses are being tracked in our Learning Record Store, for later analysis so that we can further customize these tools and improve your experience.)

Authoring notes:This assemblage of modules provides some features that are not apparent to the front-end user. This page contains tools from WordPress, H5P and OpenLabyrinth and blends them to provide a combination of features and customizations that would not be feasible within any one of the tools singly. More importantly, every activity, click, video rewind, etc is all tracked, using the Experience API, and sends this activity data to a common LRS platform from all 3 distinct software applications. If you are interested in learning more about the use of the ADL xAPI in health professional education, contact us through the MedBiquitous Learning Experience Working Group.